Stephanie A. Smith took her PhD from Berkeley (1990). Prior to taking her academic position at the University of Florida, she free-lanced, worked as an editor for Western Imprints, as an assistant at Glamor and Mademoiselle magazines, at David Godine in Boston, and at Representations and is presently a consultant for Feminist Studies.

A novelist, she is the author of: THE WARPAINT TRILOGY, Warpaint (2012), Baby Rocket (2013) and Content Burns (2014, all Thames River Press); Other Nature (TOR 1995), The-Boy-Who-Was-Thrown-Away (1987) and Snow-Eyes (both Atheneum, 1985).

She has held multiple fiction residencies at the Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s Residency in the Noepe Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Norcroft, Provincetown and Dorland.

Examining the intersection of science, literature, politics, race and gender, her essays appear in such journals as differences, Criticism, Genders, American Literature and American Literary History. A 1998 Visiting NEH Scholar at UCLA, she is the author of Conceived By Liberty (Cornell 1995) and Household Words (Minnesota 2006).

Currently, she is finishing a new critical book about aesthetics and the publishing industry in the United States, titled The Muse and The Marketplace, a chapter of which, “Union Blues: Melville’s Poetic In(ter)ventions,” appears in Genre (spring 2014); she is also finishing a new novel, Strange Grace, as well as working on several other projects, in both criticism and fiction.